Study: Your child’s drawings can determine future I.Q.

Before you toss those stick figure drawings your child did at preschool, you might want to take a close look.

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London conducted a study revealing that children’s drawings might offer a clue to their intelligence as a toddler and also to their I.Q. level down the road.

For the study, the team looked at drawings from 7,752 pairs of identical and non-identical twins (a total of 15,504 children) that were collected for the Medical Research Council’s Twins Early Development Study. Each child was asked to draw another child and their figures were scored between 0 and 12. Higher scores were given to those children who included the correct quantity of features such as head, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, body, and arms. A drawing with two legs, two arms, a body and head, but no facial features, earned a score of 4, for example.

The preschoolers were also given a verbal intelligence test and then the same children were given an I.Q. test at age 14.

The researchers found that higher scores on the drawing test were moderately associated with higher scores of intelligence at ages 4 and 14.

“The Draw-a-Child test was devised in the 1920’s to assess children’s intelligence, so the fact that the test correlated with intelligence at age 4 was expected,”Dr. Rosalind Arden, the paper’s lead author, said in a statement. “What surprised us was that it correlated with intelligence a decade later.”

Dr. Arden adds that parents shouldn’t be alarmed if their 4-year-olds’ stick figures have three eyes and one arm. “The correlation is moderate, so our findings are interesting,” Dr. Arden said, “but it does not mean that parents should worry if their child draws badly. Drawing ability does not determine intelligence, there are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life.”

Another interesting finding from the study: Figures from identical twins pairs were more similar to one another than drawings from non-identical twin pairs, indicating the presence of a drawing genetic link.

“This does not mean that there is a drawing gene – a child’s ability to draw stems from many other abilities, such as observing, holding a pencil et cetera,” Dr. Arden explained. “We are a long way off from understanding how genes influence all these different types of behavior.”